Prove You're Not Human Scum

A tentacled alien awaits your reply...

GREETINGS, ADVENTURER!

Today’s quest is invading your inbox. When you’re finished, let’s have a spoiler-free Nope chat in Table Talk, and I’ll highlight a few favorite comments from Table Talks past. Tally ho!

⚠️ HEADS UP! I’ll be releasing an adventure next week and it’ll be a little different. I’m ending The Great Substack Challenge, a collaboration between 13 fiction newsletter writers. I only have one week to write the interactive final chapter to a sci-fi detective story that’s been told over the course of several months. Next week: “The Grisly Ghosts of Gruesome Time.”

TODAY’S QUEST:

Aliens have taken over the planet. It's not great! Those tentacled sons of bitches flicked off power grids across the globe, locked people into laser-cages, and refused to acknowledge humans need midday snacks or we get cranky. Earth's in big trouble, but you heard that human rebels have commandeered an alien ship to blast away from this stupid planet. It's just three blocks away at the harbor and it's leaving tonight. To get there, you'll need to sneak quietly past alien guards at the corner of your block.

You fail to do that. A bug-eyed guard catches you trying to walk around them in your squeaky old Sketchers.

"ARE YOU HUMAN?" asks a particularly dumb alien guard with a pulverizer gun pointed at your forehead.

"Uh, no?" you brilliantly respond. "I'm a Nopellian like you, but unlike you, I'm... in disguise."

"PROVE YOU ARE NOT HUMAN SCUM. ANSWER THIS QUESTION: WHAT IS YOUR RESPONSE TO UNFORTUNATE CIRCUMSTANCES?"

What would you like to say?

• "I fire my pulverizer gun!"

• "I consult the mega brain!"

• "I get sad."

LET’S CHAT!

When your quest is complete, it’s time to debrief. Join your fellow adventurers at the virtual D&D table we call the comments section. What you say here won’t affect your character sheet. Unless you want it to?

Discuss one (or all) of today’s topics in the comments:

🚀 Did you manage to get off this stinking planet?

👽 If there’s “intelligent life” out there, do you think it’s more or less intelligent than us?

🌌 Which would you rather own: a teleporter or a time machine? When it comes to getting rich quick, I think there’s so much more potential upside to a time machine. Go forward a week and you’ll have access to multimillion dollar lotto numbers and next week’s Marmaduke. (He gets mud all over the sofa, if you can believe it.) But I’m going with teleporter and I’ll tell you why in the comments.

LOOK WHO’S TABLE TALKING

One of my favorite parts of running Adventure Snack is the Table Talk section above, where I hear from players like yourself. Today I want to shout-out players who’ve recently replied to games with insightful, funny, weird, and all-of-the-above comments…

In the Table Talk for Bigfoot is Your Landlord, adventurer Elly explains why mountain goats are more dangerous than bears, cougars, or coyotes in the Pacific Northwest. I was shocked!

Mountain goats are highly aggressive animals and attack over 6,000 people a year, with a number of them being fatal. Meanwhile black bear and cougar attacks are rare since they are more interested in getting away from you. Coyotes don’t bother adults at all, I’ve even hiked trails alongside them on occasion. They are fun conversationalists though do pose a risk to kids and pets.

Adventurer Jay, who writes the insightful Game + Word newsletter, weighs the ethics of breaking the timeline in the Table Talk for Vacation in an Infinite Time Loop. I hope Jay is never put in this situation, for all our sakes! 😅

I'd take my chances with creating a paradox. Sure, maybe spacetime itself would crash, but maybe if I can stop whatever triggers the time loop, then there'd be no need for me to keep going back in time repeatedly, thus my life would continue as normal. I'd be willing to take that chance once I got sufficiently bored with immortality.

Adventurer Maggie H tells us about the magical item she’d go on a quest to acquire in the Table Talk for Aquire All 7 Crystals of Power (on eBay). As a writer, I could super-relate. Where do I have to quest to get one of these?

I would probably go on an epic quest to acquire a typewriter-like keyboard with all the modern conveniences of mechanical switch keyboards. It's so hard to find one that has that typewriter feel without it being cheaply made T_T

Finally, adventurer Molly geeks out over vintage school supplies in the Table Talk for You Are a Lisa Frank Dolphin. She reminds me that not all our players are from the US, and not all of our crap leaves our weird country!

I am not in the US so I never had a Trapper Keeper (I had to google what it was), but I did have Lisa Frank stickers which I loved. I also used to love those scented markers that smelled like fruit. And erasers! At my school everyone collected erasers, all the different shaped ones like rabbits, and fruit and objects. Some of them were scented too. Even stickers were scented, scratch and sniff stickers! Now I think about it a lot of stationery was scented back in the 80s.Thats... weird, right?

Thanks to all the adventurers who #JoinTheConversation in Table Talk. I always love hearing from you!

FIRST TIME HERE?

Adventure Snack is a game series I email to subscribers. Play Adventure Snack for free and turn your inbox into an adventure!

I’m a narrative designer for video games. I’ve written for Capcom, Ubisoft, Square Enix, and indie studios around the world. Follow me @geoffreygolden on Twitter.